We can reform our democracies, corporations and co-ops by creating better voter information systems: let voters allocate some community funds to competing media. More info at votermedia.org.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Rebranding "VFM" as "VoterMedia"

I think it's a good long term plan to call it "VoterMedia" instead of "VFM". This is for both meanings -- the VoterMedia system, and the voter media.

E.g.:
"VoterMedia increases engagement in a democracy."
"Voter media tend to be more issues-oriented than mainstream media."

Main reasons:

1. As we expand the movement beyond UBC, "VoterMedia" is immediately meaningful to people who have never heard of it, whereas "VFM" is not.

2. If you google for "votermedia", all hits are relevant to this project. If you google for "vfm", most hits are about other things.

3. We have the web domains votermedia.org, votermedia.com, votermedia.net, votermedia.ca, votermedia.us, voterfundedmedia.org, and voter-media.org. We have none of the vfm.anything domains -- all are taken.

4. As a domain name, voterfundedmedia.org is too long; votermedia.org is short enough. VFM is a handy abbreviation of voter funded media, but VoterMedia (which could sometimes be spelled "voter media" or "voter-media") is short enough to be handy too.

5. One name, less confusion.

I'm not saying we should be obnoxious about it, trying to stop people from saying VFM. But we can gradually move toward "votermedia".

What do you think?

(BTW I'm giving a brief talk on VoterMedia at the UBC AMS Council meeting tomorrow evening.)

1 comment:

Another reason for this rebranding: Twitter tag #VFM is being used to mean Value For Money. When we want a short abbreviation in a local discussion, we can use VM; but for global uniqueness on the web, votermedia works well.